1st Edition
Matters of Revolution Urban Spaces and Symbolic Politics in Berlin and Warsaw After 1989
Introduction: Considering the Iconic Wall
1. Point of View
2. Iconicity, or What Makes Social Performances S/tick
3. The Revolution That Did Get Televised
4. Post-revolutionary Nostalgia
5. The Death and Life of Great Communist Palaces
Epilogue: Writing Material Culture
Biography
Dominik Bartmanski is Heisenberg Fellow based at the Chair of Cultural Sociology at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. He is the co-author of Labels: Making Independent Music and Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age and the co-editor of Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life.
"This is a beautifully written book that demonstrates how the built environment and its iconic nature affects us all. Dealing with the icons of the Soviet bloc (in Berlin and Warsaw), it covers history that still exerts its presence among us. That history will continue to be important. The larger point of the book, however, is applicable beyond the case examined, indeed globally, (and couched in) outstandingly readable prose, much more engaging than what is usually produced by social scientists."
Douglas Porpora, Drexel University, USA
"Through a richly evocative reflection upon iconicity and spatiality, Bartmanski turns the cultural sociological kaleidoscope so that we see 1989, the Berlin Wall, and the fall and aftermath of Communism in a profoundly new light."
David Inglis, University of Helsinki, Finland
"By focusing on their ‘political materiality,’ Dominik Bartmanski sheds new light on the revolutions of 1989 and explains why some became global icons of the fall of communism and others did not. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, Matters of Revolution proves the relevance of cultural sociology to the study of social movements and political processes."
Geneviève Zubrzycki, University of Michigan, USA
